Windows Recovery Screen after imaging with USB dongle

[JYost]

After a couple of recent FOG upgrades we are experiencing a strange issue when imaging laptops. If the laptop is equipped with an on board LAN port (RJ45) the image works fine, snapins install, and all is good. If the laptop only has a USB-C port and we use a USB adapter the image will come down fine, however after the restart it will immediately come up to the recovery screen. We are using the MAC address of the USB adapter and we have LAN pass through disabled in the BIOS. We are using Ubuntu 24.03 with FOG 1.5.10.1721, however it happened with the previous version as well (Sept.2025). The laptops we’ve encountered this on thus far have both been Lenovo L14 Gen2 (Type 20X1/20X2), however these devices imaged with USB dongles without any problem before the 2 most recent FOG updates. Any ideas/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!!

[Tom Elliott]

@JYost I’m not aware of anything that would have changed regarding the type of network used especially if it works fine for the on-board network but not when you do it through the USB C dongle adapter?

The FOG Client can use dongles as well, but the fact you’re seeing the recovery screen when coming off the USB Adapter? That is strange and different and more likely something manufacturer specific (best I can guess.)

As for the FOG Client software operationality: the USB Dongle should work just fine if it’s associated to the device and has the expected snapins, etc… If it’s a generic Adapter, you may have enabled “ignore for client” on the mac address just to ensure all machines using that dongle aren’t getting assigned the same Hostname, Snapins, printers, etc…

Though, normally/ideally when the FOG Client checks in it looks up all MAC’s passed in, and attempts to find the host using any one of the MAC addresses associated to that machine even if ti’s not the one directly plugged in. It’s possible the onboard mac (when unplugged and system initially loaded) isn’t even recognized or sending as part of this authentication process, but without the FOG Client logs, I can only make WAGs at this point. Probably still some what blind with the logs, but at least we have data to work with that way.

As for the recovery screen, I’m not sure I have an answer for that. I can make another Guess there, and most likely it’s related to the kernel version. You could try some older version kernels using the kernel updater page and see if one of those older ones don’t force your machine into a Recovery Screen. It still seems very vendor specific, but I’ve seen odd issues of firmware temporary writes that do some weird things to Network devices between the FOS and Windows boots that might be happening in your case as well. Again, just a WAG.

[Nhussain]

@Tom-Elliott to note, this has been happening on all our Lenovo L14s laptops (with no LAN ports), tested with 3 different Lenovo USB-C LAN Adaptors

When booting back up, it brings the Blue screen error:

‘Recovery
Your PC couldn’t start properly
After multiple tries, the operating system on your PC failed to start, so it needs to be repaired.
Error code: 0xc0000001
You’ll need to use recovery tools. If you don’t have any installation media (like a disc or USB device), contact your PC administrator or PC/Device manufacturer.
Press Enter to try again
Press F1 to enter Recovery Environment
Press F8 for Startup Settings
Press Esc for UEFI Firmware Settings’

As John mentioned, we used the same LAN adaptor previously and managed to image via FOG successfully before.

i even tried changing the mac address to the default internal laptop mac address after the initial fog image completed (when it shutdowns the laptop) and booted the laptop back up to see if it helps but no luck